This Little Piggy Went to Heaven

by Desmond Christy

The Guardian - London October 24 1997

In 'A Pig's Tale' (Channel 4) an old Haitian woman was asked how she
was. She replied: "I'm struggling on as best I can since I no longer have
my mother's breast to suckle". Life in Haiti has never been easy, even when
Mum was around. The gods - monotheism doesn't apply in these parts - have
always had a down on Haiti. But at least they had not harmed the little
black Haitian pigs. I'm sure they thought that living under a vicious
dictatorship was enough to be getting on with.

But 17 years ago the gods - or so it may have seemed to Haitians - sent
African swine fever. And then they sent something much worse than African
swine fever - Americans bearing gifts. The United States - and its generous
pig farming industry - decided to back an aid programme that would eradicate
every Haitian black pig, regardless of whether they were ill or healthy.
They even used helicopters to chase and kill the feral pigs.

Living up the road from Sainsbury's and Tesco, we need a little help in
imagining what this meant to the people of Haiti. "The creole pig was our
whole life," a Haitian man told us. "It was the pig that birthed us, the
pig that raised us, the pig that buried us." Pigs were the island's honking
bank accounts. Pigs paid to put kids through school (six out of 10 of the
island's children still cannot read), paid for your wedding, and paid for
the scrap of land you wanted to buy.

In 'A Pig's Tale', we followed Juste, back from Brooklyn and wondering
what happened to all those pigs, and Edgar, a Voodoo priest, also wondering
what happened to all those pigs. Edgar needed a pig to sacrifice to a spirit
called Erzulie Dantor. Did the Americans miss any? Was the $30 they gave you
to snitch on any neighbour hiding a pig enough?

A few have survived, it seems. Edgar found one and gave it to Erzulie
Dantor. Knives, dancing, chanting, blood. Juste found that even 60 healthy
pigs kept on Turtle Island had been slaughtered.

Still, the land of the turkey had another gift. Iowa sent some of its
porkers. Giant beasts used to an American standard of living. Haitians soon
wised up to the beasts that were overfed, and over there: "These pigs needed
better living conditions than we Haitians"; "You had to build them a house
out of concrete, which no peasant could afford for himself"; "We had to get
them to a doctor practically every week. But when we were ill, we could
never get a doctor".

Maggie O'Kane of the Guardian, who wrote and narrated the commentary to
this terribly memorable film (directed and produced by Leah Gordon and Anne
Parisio), told us that the aid workers wrote in their final report that
perhaps they had made a mistake in eradicating all the pigs. There was no
real need to destroy all those pigs. Cuba had experienced a similar
outbreak of African swine fever but it didn't destroy all its pigs.

We watched as Haitians scavenged on rubbish heaps where once the creole
pig had looked for food. Maggie O'Kane sounded as though she was trying not
to lose her temper. The imperialist pigs - I mean, of course, those overfed
creatures from Iowa - had triumphed again.